Sunday, May 18, 2014

"The Intellectual Bankruptcy of The Pseudoscience Of Anti-Ufology"

Every so often I run across a splendid example of the intellectual bankruptcy of the pseudoscience of Anti-Ufology. This bookis such an example with Paris obeying the 4 basic rules of debunkdom:

A). Don’t bother me with the facts, my mind’s made up.
B). What the public doesn’t know, I won’t tell them.
C). If one can’t attack the data, attack the people
D). Do ones research by proclamation, investigation is too much trouble.

I was not surprised. Last year Paris used these techniques to throw out the story of the recovery of a crashed saucer in the Plains of San Agustin, NM, in July, 1947, at about the same time as the Roswell incident. Paris used 2 neat tricks:

1). Throw out any data connected with Barney Barnett, since after all no investigator talked to him.

Obviously they couldn’t, since Barney died well before I got the investigation going after talking to Verne and Jean Maltais in Bemidji, Minnesota. We did talk to his wife, his boss, his neighbor, his niece, and Colonel William Leed and others, and wrote about them in such books as my "Crash at Corona."Leed had been given Barney’s name by his commanding officer as somebody who knew about saucers and talked to Barney on a Western trip. Barney only spoke to him after he showed credentials. Bill contacted me after hearing me on a Toronto radio station.

2). The second neat trick was to invoke time travel.

An airplane, that had crashed in the area 3 years earlier, must have been the basis for the story. One is reminded of the time travel conjured up by the USAF to provide crash test dummies to explain stories of bodies at Corona—even though none were dropped until 6 years later; were 6’ tall, weighed 175 pounds, and were dressed in flight gear!!

Paris clearly has an agenda to do everything possible to prove that there is no way that aliens from outside our solar system could possibly get here. It would be too far, take too long, take too much time, take too much food; humans couldn’t handle the stresses, etc., ad nauseam.

Paris does apparently have a background in military intelligence. As a space scientist, I have worked on fission and fusion rockets , compact nuclear reactors for space applications, the Pioneer spacecraft, etc and still belong to the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics, the American Physical Society, and the American Nuclear Society. The book has a surface gloss of being scientific as Paris provides 156 References. Unfortunately, he doesn’t mention most of the work indicating the feasibility of interstellar travel or the reality of alien visitors. No mention of physical trace cases, multiple witness radar visual cases, appropriate technology, for us no less aliens, if we wanted to spend the money. There is no mention of my Chapter, “You Can Get Here From There” in my 2007 book “Flying Saucers and Science"nor my article “Star Travel: How Realistic is It?” in the 2011 volume “UFOs and Aliens”. He obviously is aware of me having sent me the book.

For reasons unknown, other than to provide propaganda, he frequently invokes “Intergalactic” visitors. Why? The Milky Way Galaxy has more than 100 Billion stars and is about 100,000 light years across. There are more than 2000 stars within a mere 55 light years of the sun. Andromeda is 2.5 million light years away with smaller galaxies “only” hundreds of thousand light years away. He stresses that the universe is 13 Billion years old. This is totally irrelevant to the question of visitors from nearby places like Zeta 1 and Zeta 2 Reticuli which are only 39.3 light years away. Last year he dismissed the crash in the Plains of San Agustin.

In the new tome he gets rid of Roswell just as irrationally. There is unfortunately no index, but we find this gem on page 161. Speaking of the ET hypothesis:

”The UFO community often modifying and revising their agenda to conform to the prevailing culture of their memberships…. A clear example of this occurred when the UFO community was faced with a serious institutional crisis regarding the US government’s explanation for the 1947 Roswell incident. Rather than accepting the proven fact that the UFO was actually a balloon under the auspices of project Mogul, the UFO community conveniently resorted to claims of a government cover-up”.

Proven fact?! Mogul was the third explanation with the fourth being related to crash test dummies. How absurd. Mogul consisted of a train of 20-25 standard neoprene weather balloons linked by string at 20’ intervals. There was nothing classified about the technology only the purpose—to listen for sound waves that would be produced by the first Soviet nuclear explosion. Major Marcel and Colonel Blanchard were very familiar with standard neoprene weather balloons launched from the base almost every day. They were not made of indestructible foil like materials with memory metal properties. Paris, despite all the references, doesn’t even mention the 2 large Roswell reports. Moreover, Dr. David Rudiak showed there was no Mogul Launch that would fill the bill.

The notion that there has been no government cover-up of Roswell in particular, or UFOs in general, is easily shown to be baloney. Can Paris provide unexpurgated copies of the 156 pages of Top SECRET Umbra NSA UFO documents on which one can read one sentence per page with the rest being whited out? How about the dozens of heavily redacted CIA TOP SECRET UMBRA UFO documents on which one can read a few words per page with everything else being blacked out?

Paris’ bias is illustrated by this:

”Ufology, in short, is now a cult in which belief in extraterrestrials is analogous to belief in the supernatural.”

No basis is provided. It is no wonder he doesn’t mention most of the solid sources of data such as Blue Book Special Report 14 or The Congressional Hearings of 1968, or Dr. J. Allan Hynek’s book “The UFO Experience”. It would certainly be more accurate to say that disbelief in UFOs is a cult fed by arrogance and ignorance. I recall Dr. Campbell, an astronomer, who in 1941 computed that getting a man to the moon and back would require a rocket with an initial launch weight of a million-million tons. He assumed, for no good reason, a single stage rocket limited to 1G acceleration and having to provide all the energy rather than taking advantage of cosmic freeloading. Saturn V weighed only 3000 tons at launch of the Apollo Missions.

The book, ”Science Was Wrong” by Kathleen Marden and myself has many examples of smart people reaching foolish conclusions about impossibility because of their ignorance and arrogance. Paris even quotes the silly finding of astronomer Dr. Neil deGrasse Tyson as expressed in the Peter Jennings ABC-TV Mockumentary of February 2005, that our fastest spacecraft, Voyager, would take 77,000 years to reach the nearest star, ignoring the simple fact that it has had no propulsion system operating since leaving the vicinity of the Earth. He even claims that therefore one of our fastest man made spacecraft would take over a billion years to cross the Milky Way. Yes and Ferdinand Magellan’s ship took 3 years to circle the earth. But the ISS takes only 90 minutes. Next we will be told that tossing a bottle in the ocean will tell us how long it would take to cross it. Paris seems to have no understanding of the simple fact that technological progress comes from doing things differently in an unpredictable way. His approach seems to be based on the totally untenable concept that the future can only be an extrapolation of the past. Maybe he does use a slide rule instead of an electronic calculator.

I must give Paris credit for Chutzpah. On page 164 he claims that in 2013 he conducted a comprehensive analysis of approximately 10,000 sightings reported to MUFON. That would be about 200 reports a week. How comprehensive could it have been? Where did he report his findings? He also claims that:

“even though a handful of pilots, military personnel and police officers did report seeing UFOs … such reports are too often sensationalized. Their reliability can only be established once a thorough Personal Credibility Assessment Investigation on them is completed”.

He is living in a dream world, but I notice he doesn’t offer to pay for work to be done. Nor does he mention that in Blue Book Special Report 14, a quality evaluation was done of all the 3201 sightings investigated by Battelle Memorial Institute. It was found that the better the quality of the sighting report the more likely it was unexplainable, the opposite of what one might expect from his faulty reasoning
Paris tries to make deep space travel far too dangerous to be happening routinely. He states (p.44):

”The universe is unbelievably violent and prone to extremes making interstellar travel precarious.”

He talks about how deadly gamma ray bursts can be, though he does admit none have been observed in the entire Milky Way. Is he unaware that 34,000 Americans were killed last year in automobile accidents? In recent years 10,000 Americans were killed each year by guns. Would he suggest that all cars should be removed from American roads and all guns be banned?

”Fish and the astronomical community agreed that the binary stars within the pattern were too close together to support life. Soon thereafter Fish released a statement that the correlation between the Hill map and Zeta Reticuli was highly unlikely.”

A lot of papers could be written about the foolishness of Paris’ anti interstellar travel rants. But I must ask, what is the reason behind them? Is somebody paying him to try to stem the increasing acceptance of alien visitations? Is he still connected with the Intelligence Community? Why is he so selective about his references? I honestly don’t believe he is stupid. He is certainly highly motivated, but why?

7 comments
:

People this off base from commonly accepted now reality are obviously paid dissinformers whose clap trap aught to be ignored because the mainstream now in all likelihood will ignore it. To be this good at skirting the facts takes a smart person. Cover up for sure.

the idea of ufo's was created by Hitler, in Germany, when an anti gravity, or electro magnetic machine was found in Northern Turkey, from there Iron mountain supported the idea of an Alien invasion, they are now splicing and dicing dna to create an et we can all believe in...

Mr. Friedman's review is so right on the money in my opinion. I am quite familiar with Mr. Paris's Facebook posts and links to his website and organization. He is prone to calling believers names and tries to make them sound looney. He'll post very obvious photos of non ufo objects to show people that what everyone is seeing is stuff like lenticular clouds and birds. Again, trying to make believers look stupid. I've commented many times, but have only gotten one answer and that was to "prove" a faked photo of the Belgium Wave triangle craft. He had originally asked his Facebook followers if anyone could produce a real ufo photo and I answered him with a photo of the triangle. His answer was prompt and short and came with a link to the story showing the "truth". I had no idea at that point that the photo was a fake and so that is why I posted that photo. The frustrating thing is that he seems to believe that humans will never, ever figure out the trick to interstellar space travel. He never mentions the fact that there are many astrophysicists who believe that it will be possible someday, just not now. Who knows how many civilizations hundreds, thousands and possibly even millions of years ahead of us, can already travel the stars? Anyway, I guess I feel better now that I have read Mr. Friedman's review since it mirrors how my opinion and shows examples and insight. Thank you Mr. Friedman.

I was a member of API, I can say that Mr Paris has made some terrible personal slams against some people well-known within the UFO community. About you Mr. Friedman, he's a pro at that. If he cannot answer a question, he just slams the person asking the question. He said recently that 'believers' were delusional'

And he'd only talk to those willing to accept that we ARE ALONE. Way to keep an open mind. He likes to tell people about his days as an agent. I for one think its laughable. He's narcissistic, dismissive and basically just a jerk. He won't last long in this community as he has a secret agenda he continues to work towards. I had no idea that dis-information & mis-information 'agents' still exist. THEY DO! Thanks for the great book review Mr. Friedman, you were spot on!! '

Brett Holman had written in the Fortean Times (November 2008) that the updated star chart data had shifted the relative positions of several stars in the Hill-Fish map, and so the Zeta Reticuli interpretation was no longer a match. Kevin Randle, Steve Pearse, Charles Huffer of MUFON, and Robert Sheaffer have agreed with this in print or online.

Friedman, certain of the match since the early 1970s, was asked to comment on how HIPPARCHOS impacted the Fish interpretation. He was asked twice on UFO Updates by Martin Shough -- Friedman gave no answer the first time and said he was too busy to comment the second time! Kevin Randle and Robert Sheaffer both blogged that they asked Friedman about the matter in person; they report he responded that there might be problems with the Fish map in light of HIPPARCHOS, but Stan has not made any public re-assessment of his position. In late October 2012, Sheaffer reprinted a 2009 summing up Friedman's hypocrisy about the Hill-Fish star map. Friedman responded in the December 2012 MUFON journal with a broad tirade against skeptics. On the subject of the Hill-Fish map, Friedman left that for the end of the piece, merely mentioning HIPPARCHOS then moving on without addressing any of his critics' points!

Reading Friedman's piece, you would think HIPPARCHOS had no impact on the Fish map. You would think only dreaded debunkers disagreed with Friedman, though several UFO proponents have challenged Friedman about the map.

On this subject, Friedman has used all four of the so-called debunkers rules to avoid changing his long-held position. So when Friedman writes about "the intellectual bankruptcy of pseudoscience," he is qualified to do so, because Stan is ufology's top practitioner of pseudoscience.

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